Facebook Struggles On

Procter and Gamble has been at the forefront of calling out agencies and digital platforms for their lack of transparency – contractual and financial in the case of the agencies, measurement-wise in the case of the major platforms.

As part of putting their money where their mouth is, P&G threatened to withhold dollars from those media vendors (including Facebook and Google) who had not put their house in order by the end of 2017.

Now it seems that Procter might have an even better reason not to spend money on the digital platforms – they don’t seem to work for them.

An article in ‘The Wall Street Journal’ has P&G’s CFO commenting on the decision to cut US$100m in Q2 from its digital spend (anyone else remember when Procter simply never commented publicly on their marketing activities?).

Joe Moeller says: “After cutting back on certain digital ads, we didn’t see a reduction in the growth rate. What that tells me is that the spending we cut was largely ineffective.”

Meanwhile, Facebook struggles on, reporting a 47% increase in ad revenues over the same Q2, to US$9.16b.

What seems to be happening here is that Facebook, and indeed the other digital platforms aren’t doing a great job for major brand builders, exampled by Procter but are remaining popular amongst those less interested in building brand demand and more interested in short-term activation.

You could argue that P&G, and others like them are more rigorous in their assessment of what works and what doesn’t but that would be unfair. If you’re running a business driven by short-term response then you know very well, and very quickly what works and what doesn’t. …

… read on at bjanda.com

Originally posted by Brian Jacobs on The Cog Blog at BJ&A
3rd August 2017

Brian Jacobs will be moderating a discussion on these issues between David Wheldon, President of the World Federation of Advertisers, and Bob Hoffman, the Ad Contrarian, during the joint session of the 2017 asi International Conferences on 8th November in Nice, France.